Chapter 6: “Normal” Dungeon Format
He was going to stop jinxing himself one of these days. Yes, DAYS. The next obstacle was a winding system of caves, packed with patrols of four goblins, one shaman, and one hobgoblin. Which were basically goblins but tougher and stronger. Every now and again, he would be ambushed by three night lurkers with an alpha and Knight lurker with them. Which were basically night lurkers but tougher and stronger. You get it.
There was only one time so far that he had been ambushed while fighting a patrol, and it gave him an excellent look at the ins and outs of his new buff.
Possibly the only way that this floor was possible was that the Improvement he received from the potion actually boosted Recovery. A Hidden Aspect, and one of the most powerful. It stimulated the Constitution Aspect to massively accelerate the body’s natural healing process, and even regenerate tissues.
Every time he got seriously injured fighting a patrol or ambush, he had to slink around waiting for it to restore him to peak performance. If another patrol approached, he had to avoid it or hide from it, but moving around in new areas opened him up to encountering night lurker ambushes.
So far, he had to have killed at least a dozen of each, and spent at least two days on this floor. The healing was extremely generous, far faster than an equal upgrade to his other three boosts, but it still took hours to fully recover from his wounds.
As he came upon another patrol, he was reminded of the final way the trial was screwing with him. A bug with way to many eyes and claws was hovering on a leash held by the hobgoblin.
It looked like a string of hexagonal segments, except the segments opened intermittently to reveal bulbous orange eyes that did not belong on a bug. In a defiance of the natural form, it had thin scythes extending from random places along its body.
This wasn’t even the most horrifying creation that he had come across. Every few patrols he would find one with some sort pet monstrosity. Despite their utterly bizarre and seemingly random forms, they all followed certain patterns.
They all had an unnatural form with impractical weapons that would break easily or be hard to grow naturally, or just extremely detailed, like the magnetic railguns inside the jaguar-squid’s tentacles.
They also all had a similar behavior. When their handler was killed, they exploded into a mindless frenzy to get at him, disregarding the other goblins left alive in their rage. It was still best to kill all the goblins first, because of another peculiarity they shared.
They all had a strange black sphere inside of them. This sphere would start turning their blood black when they went into a frenzy, and once it was all black, they would explode into black goo. When he had killed them before this happened, he had got a nasty surprise.
The black core would create a copy of the creature, with slight differences to make it more effective for fighting him. When they exploded, the core was destroyed as well. Nothing else would do it. He even thought he was clever in trying to use the rat fang he still possessed, but it didn’t do anything. The goo was very acidic, so he usually crippled them before retreating. The acid burns healed surprisingly quickly but hampered his movement significantly until then.
Before the patrol reached him, he went a bit farther down the tunnel. This was important because any lurker ambushes would have already triggered, allowing him fight with abandon. Once they were a safe distance away from unexplored ground, he charged straight at the shaman.
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The goblins always froze for an instant before exploding into action. He didn’t want to exploit this too much, as it might change in the future, but it was a reliable way to kill the shaman before he had to worry about their curses and buffs.
Neatly separating the goblins head from its shoulders, he immediately spun and kicked the hob in the skull hard enough to knock it over. Before it could rise he waded into combat with the four other goblins, disregarding the hexa-pede for now. He managed to kill two of them before the hobgoblin and its pet attacked.
Choosing to accept blows from the basic goblins instead of the pair, he lunged into the two remaining ones and killed them before they could react. Turning his blade just in time to deflect the hobgoblin’s club, he sent it to the side and cut off the monsters dominant arm.
As the hobgoblin roared in pain, he took the chance to start cutting off the hexa-pede’s scythes and wings before it got enraged. They were fairly hesitant and timid before the hobs were killed, allowing him to cripple them at little risk.
Ok, he was exaggerating. They were still powerful monsters, and could easily kill him if he wasn’t careful. He didn’t have any way to practice for them, so he had to try and figure out ways to fight them and how they would move just by looking.
After shearing off most of it wings, Jax once again parried the hobgoblins attack, this time without even looking. Ending the hob with a stab to the heart, he immediately ran away from the hexa-pede.
Before its masters death it was floundering on the ground, trying to cope with the loss of its wings. But the moment he ended the muscly monster, it started using its remaining scythes to skitter across the floor, every movement somehow both frenzied and perfectly controlled.
Jax liked to think that he was a pragmatic person. There was no real benefit to fighting the enraged abomination. He was faster than it and had plenty of space to run. He just had to let it kill itself. So he fled back down the tunnel.
After hearing a screech and a gory explosion, he quickly checked on its death spot to ensure nothing out of the ordinary happened. Seeing an almost identical crater to all the ones before, he congratulated himself on a clean victory and moved back on to mapping out the cave system.
Jax panted furiously as he clutched his side. He was surrounded by the bodies of lurkers and goblins, all covered in black acid goop. If the second patrol had also had a monstrosity, he would be dead. Heck, he didn’t even know if one of their core explosions would destroy the other’s core, or let them revive! Coupled with two packs of night lurkers, he really shouldn’t still be kicking.
His left arm was gone, sliced off by a Knight lurker. He wasn’t even safe yet, as a patrol could easily happen across him before he recovered. He groaned. “Why can’t I either die or stop almost dying.” He joked to thin air.
It took hours, but when he was stable enough to move he went back to safe territory to begin the long process of regrowing his arm. Yet another good thing about the Recovery Aspect was that it vastly reduced the need for food.
While you still needed some sustenance to prevent your Constitution Aspect from being overworked, you could go for a while off regenerated energy stores. Coupled with the reduced need for food from being in an Improving realm, Jax could go on for days without his performance being affected. Although his regeneration would suffer as the Constitution Aspect depleted.
He did force down some night lurker flesh to help keep the Aspect running, but he didn’t really know how it worked. The ins and outs of a Hidden Aspect weren’t something that’s taught to unimproved children.
After a few days and increasing concerns about night lurkers spoiling, his arm was back, good as new. He had already mapped out the tunnels and figured out all the patrol patterns before his injury. He had cleared out all patrols and night lurkers in the caves, leaving only one place to go. That was the tunnel where he encountered the double patrol.
The night lurkers in there had waited until he engaged the goblins before appearing. If it wasn’t for the venom-spraying fang urchin monstrosity, the pincer attack would have been successful. He barely managed to kill the hobgoblin controlling it, and even then he had to dodge the corrosive streams of death AND two almost full groups of each type. He was lucky he only lost an arm.
He cautiously continued down the tunnel. or… up. The tunnel had started sloping ever so slightly. He thought for a moment that he would reach the surface, which didn’t make sense as this was technically all in the basement of that bar.
The tunnel eventually opened up into a giant chamber of dull crystal lit by orangish yellow light. Still underground, technically. At the far wall was some sort of throne, made from a more polished version of the crystals all around. And in front of the throne… No. It couldn’t be.